ASEAN's timidity will do much to encourage China to pursue the "Sudetenland solution" for Taiwan. If China's smaller neighbors seem willing to acquiesce in China's use of force or threat against Taiwan, that will weaken American strategic resolve. If the ASEANs cannot see what is at stake for them in the Taiwan issue, why should the United States expend its blood and treasure? One of the many 'lessons' of the Vietnam War, after all, is that the United States cannot help those who are unwilling, or unable, to help themselves.
The Southeast Asian Nuclear Weapons-Free Zone-Muddled Thinking
ASEAN'S promotion of a Southeast Asian Nuclear Weapons Free Zone (SEANWFZ), endorsed in December 1995, is an example of the muddled strategic thinking which will do little to help the Southeast Asians. Aimed at hobbling China, SEANWFZ risks eroding regional security by impeding American maritime capability. The Treaty's supporters claim that "SEANWFZ highlights the fact that nuclear threats and extended nuclear deterrence are viewed as irrelevant to regional security".14 That kind of woolly thinking undermines their own security. The Clinton administration's obvious distaste for nuclear weapons had done much to encourage such befuddlement.
Without US extended deterrence for Japan and Australia―US allies at the top and the bottom of the island chain that runs down the East Asian littoral―the middle of the chain would be even more vulnerable to Chinese power. China does not need to rattle its nuclear arsenal, because all in the region know that China that possesses nuclear weapons. And have the ASEANs not noticed the nuclear threats that China has made against Taiwan?
The ASEAN countries need the United States, a distant power with no territorial claims in the region, if they wish to counter China's growing power and reach. By contrast, China's strategic needs are regional and concentrated, and it needs no allies. China's nuclear posture is one of minimum deterrence. But the United States relies on nuclear weapons far more than China does, including to protect its allies. America's dependence on nuclear weapons would increase should the mobility of American maritime forces and their capacity to deploy forward in East Asia be curtailed in future.
Seeking to constrain China, the ASEANs are more likely to hobble the United States instead. Unlike the South Pacific Nuclear Weapons Free Zone, SEANWFZ includes the Exclusive Economic Zones and continental shelves of the member states. This departure from precedent has presumably occurred because ASEAN wants to ensure that China will not deploy nuclear weapons on reefs in the South China Sea.15
